Hi kuru, grounded today because both of my children ended their semesters with nasty viruses. My daughter was coughing so much I threatened her with quarantine and a burka unless she could produce a certificate of health from our doctor. She is now on amoxycillin. My son is sleeping almost 24 hours a day, and I have to wake him up periodically to hydrate him and check his fever.

Getting back to your post, though:

It's pretty clear that women don't do 75% of the asking, but they do at least that percentage of harassing, threatening, cajoling their partners to ask. Do you really doubt this Iwonder?

I don't know, and I really don't care. I have only my experience to judge by, and I was reacting to Logic's illogical post, which included the gem, "No, at this point in time, marriage is a bad contract for men, not so for females, who initiate it 75% of the time." I don't know how anyone would be able to cite such a statistic definitely, and divorce statistics don't back him up. As I stated in my reply to Dude, it takes two people to get married, but only one to get divorced. If marriage were truly much better for women, you'd think that more women would want to stay married. Maybe Logic meant something much different than what he posted, but if so, he should have posted that or clarified when I asked him to do that. He didn't so I consider this line of thought dead.

Marriage is a contract for which the rules have changed. Simplistically, historically men brought home the bacon and women cooked it and fed it to the children that they also raised. Right? Everyone agree with that?

Ummm, not necessarily. How far back are we going? If we think of hunter/gatherer societies, everyone had a role in bringing home/raising the bacon although I suppose women were more likely to cook it. I tend to think that the roles were communal, though, and cooking was assigned somewhat like it used to be in military units before God made MREs. But perhaps not.

Considering colonial times, it's my understanding that about a third of children were orphaned before the age of 18. The other two thirds were split between single parent and two parent families, which doesn't suggest the rigid roles you described. Among two parent families, it was common for both spouses to work. Benjamin Franklin, for example, entered into a common law marriage with a woman whose husband departed with her dowry, and she and the children earned money by making candles, while Ben engaged in his various activities, several of which likely drained Ben and Deborah's coffers more than they enriched them.

But if we are only going back to the fifties, then you are correct. For the first time in American history, we were a creditor nation, rather than a debtor nation, and after a few years of war, Americans were anxious to marry and raise families. Thus, those of us who benefitted from the new affluence created the "nuclear family," which is now touted by many as the only family sanctioned by God, despite historical evidence to the contrary. We still have antibiotics so most parents live to raise their children to the age of 18, but with the decline of the middle class, we are going back to the historical norm - not deviating from it. Of course, industrialization led to the migration of most work away from the home, which is different, but the ability to telecommute is already changing that.

There's much more in your post, and I intend to address that, but given that you hate long posts, let's start here.